Why Team Based Care for IBD?

Inflammatory Bowel Disease is primarily treated by dietitians, gastroenterologists, and primary care doctors. They are invaluable for medication, surgery, medical imaging, and managing nutrition. However, there are missing parts of care. Many IBD patients are not seeing long term care. There are gaps in health support by physical therapists, social worker, exercises specialists focused on IBD (Crohn's and Ulcerative Colitis), coaching, and nursing topics to support functional health. In many cases, personalization is required for nutrition and medication management. The ability to build a larger data set of a patient profile could be helpful.

A way we think of this is population health. However, the patient is not solely a distribution. We need to understand the causes of symptoms. The biotech industry tries to find this in their best effort with endpoints. Understanding cause the environment of patient can be qualitatively known. If the person loses weight, and their blood pressure goes down, and reduces their population health risk score, this means we can assume losing weight is good. But as you know losing weight requires a finer granularity of patient understanding.

Team based care is more limited, because of the additional practitioners all in one roof, health recording not integrated across fields but without overlap, and focus on solving one problem and waiting for the next to appear. This is the whack a mole concept. Team Based Care or called Integrative Health has been used for patients when they want alternative or require care for acuities, but not general purpose care. What this means is people with health conditions that could benefit with a team based approach rarely see it.

Bringing it back to IBD, team based care can expand the offerings of care or even provide new areas of care when new health disciplines are added, expand preventative care, and build healthcare into everyday life. At RADECT Wellness, we are creating innovations to make this happen.